Reading Luke Together #21 – The Harder Beatitudes
If you give some thought to Luke 6, especially verses 20-26 (Luke’s “Beatitudes”), you’re realize an obvious, but not often understood, dynamic to Jesus’ life and teachings. In Matthew 5, we read Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount,” whereas in Luke 6 he’s “on the Plain.” Matthew’s “Beatitudes” are more familiar, very close to, but significantly different from Luke’s. Surely Jesus spoke such things many times, in many places, in many forms, emphasizing this or that for a particular crowd. He read his audience!
If you put Matthew’s and Luke’s Beatitudes side by side (and you can thumb through your Bible or google the parallels!), you’ll notice subtle but intriguing divergences – and once you notice them, you understand fully why Matthew’s are far more familiar, popular, and beloved. The preaching of the Beatitudes recorded by Luke presents a tougher, less placid or sweet Jesus.
For starters, Matthew’s “Blessed are the poor in spirit” is shortened to “Blessed are the poor.” If you’re poor, you holler Amen. If you aren’t, you spiritualize it anyhow. But Jesus clearly has a huge heart for the poor – in Luke more than the other Gospels! Never glamorizing the struggles of poverty, Jesus still has a heart - not pity but appreciation and love - for the poor, and he logically couples this with stern, frequent warnings to those who have plenty, or much. John Henry Newman was right: “Worldly possessions minister to the corrupt inclinations of our nature; they promise and are able to be gods to us, and such gods too as require no service but, like dumb idols, exalt the worshiper, impressing him with notions of his own power and security.” As Robert Barron translated in The Word on Fire Bible, “How lucky you are if you are not addicted to material things.”
Lucky? We’re never sure how best to translate Jesus’ first word in each Beatitude. “Blessed” is common – but today “blessed” (or #blessed) gets used so vapidly, as people tell and post about their comforts and achievements, failing to notice that something like being “blessed” with a beach cottage and a fabulous job implies something a bit tone-deaf to those who have less or suffer more – much less about the nature of God. Robert Schuller called these the “Be Happy Attitudes” – but happiness can become the great American idol, putting people under pressure to be or feel happy when reality or circumstances might make happiness elusive.
Barron again: “How lucky you are if you are not addicted to good feelings.” “Lucky” works for me. It’s not earned, there’s some chance in it, as if it fell into your lap – the way God’s mercy and grace fall into your lap. Then here’s what Barron does with Jesus’ beatitude about being hated or excluded: “How lucky you are if you are not addicted to the approval of others.”
The other hard-to-miss (and understandably not so beloved by us) difference is that in Luke, Jesus breaks off from blessings and shares four “Woes.” Jesus clearly missed out on the clever insights of modern writers who value positive thinking and attracting with honey, not vinegar. “Woe to you who are rich, Woe to you who are full now, Woe to you who laugh now, Woe to you when men speak well of you.” Wow. If I preached that straight up, I’d lose half my members in a day.
We do not know Jesus’ tone of voice. The word “Woe” sounds like an ominous shout, snarling tone, eyebrows clenched. But may his tone was tender, plaintive, pleading with those he loved to understand the spiritual dangers of things, and satisfying every desire, laughing away the days and nights while trouble looms not far away, or soaking up popularity and the compensations of success in this world. Jesus understand how easily we get hoodwinked by the culture, how ready we are to find our security down here instead of with God.
Do you hear in Jesus’ “Woes” that thing I’ve told you before about the “7 Deadly Sins,” which the church has warned us about for centuries? Greed, sloth, gluttony, lust, pride, envy and wrath? These describe now the good life in America; we see all 7 glamorized all over the place. But they are not of God.
Jesus’ 4 Woes appear to drive you toward cultivating what ancient Stoic philosophers called the “4 Cardinal Virtues”: temperance, justice, prudence, fortitude – important ingredients in one’s virtuous character. I wonder if it occurred to Jesus that his Woes were connected thematically to the teachings pagan thinkers – and that he wasn’t so much correcting or improving upon them, but including them?